Disruptive Abundance

Disruptive Abundance: A scenario in which more is more (9 Oct 14)

Disruptive abundance: a scenario in which more is more - Josephine Green in discussion with Jeremy Till and Ezio Manzini

Resilience is increasingly recognized as a key quality to cultivate in the face of growing complexity and turbulence. Resilience, understood both in terms of networked socio-techno-economic systems, and in terms of a continuous evolving capacity to learn and to creatively adapt. Resilient societies imply the existence of ecosystems in which human creativity, ingenuity, and skills flourish and are catalysed to solve problems and to build a new culture.

Josephine Green interprets this possibility proposing a provocative scenario in which, as she says, “more is more”: more people doing more, together, create more. More is understood here not in terms of material but in terms of immaterial assets. In her scenario, our greatest asset is the liberation of our most abundant resource, people, and the qualities that make us human. She argues that decentralized, networked, resilient systems have the potential to liberate human capacity and humane values, including sharing, caring, empathy, love, and security. These are the immaterial common goods that, at the end of the day, everybody recognizes as the basis of a good life. The wonder of such immaterial common goods, says Josephine, is that they are limitless exactly because they are immaterial. Less is more becomes more is more. In her view, if we are able to make this possibility real, then the 21st century has the potential to become the Age of a new Abundance.

Josephine Green promotes new thinking and new knowledge in the field of Social Foresight, Innovation and Change. Her advocacy in this field is based on the belief that we need a different way of perceiving, of being and of acting in the world if we are to live well and safeguard the future.

She regularly delivers international presentations and is an advisor to European Futures and Research platforms. Josephine is Visiting Professor at the University of Northumberland at the faculty of Art and Design and Social Sciences and she lectures at a number of UK and European Universities and Design Schools.

Josephine was appointed Senior Director of Trends and Strategy at Philips Design, in the Netherlands, in 1997. She left Philips in 2009 to return to the UK and started her own company Beyond20:21st century stories. (136)

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